Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003
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Trotter,
David, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the
Professionalization of English Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001, 358pp, ISBN 0-19-818755-6, Hardback price: £35 Paperback price:
Reviewed by
At
first glance Paranoid Modernism seemed, as a title, to be an oxymoron.
Wasn't paranoia an affliction with the traditional, a space where all meaning
was fixed, immutable, in an absolute system of belief? And wasn’t modernism
all that was a breaking with the tradition that paranoia clung to, an
iconoclastic disavowal of belief systems? Surely the oxymoronic adjective ought
to be replaced by the Deleuzian ‘schizophrenic’ or even the, now jaded,
Bergsonian ‘élan vital’ to denote the desire or life force of
vitality and creativity that infused modernism.
However,
Trotter’s explanation of paranoia is more traditional: Freud's paranoic
subject, Judge Schreber’s Memoirs provide the stimulus for his
definition of paranoia, ‘a universe devoid of accident’, one full ‘of
meaning and value’. Thus for Trotter, it is the paranoid's excess of meaning
and symbolism which makes ‘paranoia [...] anti-mimetic: it puts meaning and
value in place of the world.’ For Trotter, the term 'paranoia' implies
a stability, and here, modernism is a creative madness which is not
psychological breakdown but revolutionary breakthrough as R.D. Laing had us
believe. (Quoted in Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, p.131). As in Michel Foucault,
madness, in Trotter, is not mental illness, they no longer belong to the same
anthropological entity. (Quoted in a footnote, Anti-Oedipus, p.132). This
is a madness of the professional in pursuit of high expertise, and paranoia, in
this extraordinary book, is the space in which modernist intellectual identity
is constituted.
Trotter
maintains that the emergence of the professional or non-capitalist middle class
needed the construction of a new outlook. The rise of the literary
intelligentsia in particular was constituted within the discursive field of
paranoia or madness, ‘meritocracy’s illness, a psychopathy of expertise’.
An analysis of Charles Dickens, William Godwin, and Wilkie Collins’
protagonists starts off the examination of the professional’s life as
bordering on madness, which becomes the discourse within which his identity is
defined and constructed.
The
professionalization of English society and culture from 1880 to 1914 is the
context for Trotter’s positing a range of literary texts from Joseph Conrad to
the modernist triad Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis in the
category of what he calls the ‘paranoid narrative’. This is explained as a
masculine narrative of structured experiment, which denies the feminine romantic
impulse. Thus Trotter starts from the Nietzschean spirit which permeated the
years of artistic experiment: he defines this as a striving toward an austerity
and bareness and structure which was anti-naturalistic, a rejection of 'mess', a
striving he calls a ‘will-to-abstraction’. The writers he analyses all wrote
about madness, and Trotter follows the development of each during the Modernist
period. The concept of ‘paranoia’ in psychiatric literature is briefly but
concisely surveyed and distinguished from 'schizophrenia', and his thesis on
English male modernist novelists and their subjects as ‘paranoid’ now
gathers momentum.
Paranoid
Modernism
is for the most part a series of close readings of the chosen texts which are
linked to biographical details about the novelists, with the theory (Freud,
Freud's subject, Schreber, a survey of paranoia etc) constituted as separate
chapters which are largely an historical survey of the field. Thus the actual
readings of the text, though critical, remain so in the traditional sense and
could benefit from a theoretical rigour. However, Trotter’s is a well
researched, well focused book, never veering from his thesis which constitutes
the work and the ideology of the literary modernists in a precisely defined
'paranoia'.
Early
in the book, in a footnote, he identifies the use of the term
‘schizophrenia’ in postmodern theory noting that it was Frederic Jameson who
was responsible for its widespread use. It is clear here why Trotter repudiated
the, by now banal and over-used, term 'schizophrenia', opting instead for the
more conventional 'paranoia'. It is true that in so-called 'postmodern theory',
'schizophrenia' is often used, often superficially, as a word to describe
the condition of late twentieth century western culture rather than being
employed conceptually as in the original Deleuze. Trotter does identify
that the term as employed by Jameson comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and I for one am left wishing Prof. Trotter
had gone to that source. The tendency described by Trotter through the book,
both, of the novelists themselves, who tirelessly experimented, rejected old
ideas, wrote intensely in the will-to-experiment, desiring and constructing new
definitions of identity, situated as they were in a new class of English
professionals; and their protagonists, suffering yet free new individuals,
excellently argued as paranoid moderns by Trotter, can be best summed up by
Deleuze’s definition of the Nietzschean schizophrenic -- the truly free
individual; a conceptualization which does take into account the rootedness that
Trotter’s term ‘paranoia’ bestows:
The schizo knows how to leave: he
has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the
same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of
another world, he is not from another world: even when he is displacing himself
in space, his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is
erected here and remains here. For here is the desert propagated by our world,
and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos
revolve, planets for a new sun. These men of desire - or do they not yet exist?
- are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and
sicknesses. They have their [spectres]. They must reinvent each gesture. But
such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary and joyous,
finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking
permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes,
a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. (Anti-Oedipus, p.131)
However,
despite its shortcomings, Paranoid Modernism remains an original if
eccentric text, and is a valuable addition to critical writing on the high
moderns.
Bibliography:
Deleuze,
Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972),
Penguin 1977; Athlone Press, 2000.